I don’t believe in luck…but it’s getting hard to continue in disbelief.

Last night I had an insane flood in my condo in Miami Beach. I was at my desk working when all of a sudden water started shooting out of the kitchen cabinets under the sink horizontally like a fire hose. I ran into the kitchen, jammed my thumb over the hole, and while sitting in 1″ of standing water, realized that I had no way to call for help or go get help, because I’d have to remove my thumb. I tried desperately to push the faucet hose back onto the pipe that it had come off from but the water pressure was too much, and it was impossible to even get it close to lined up to put back on. I tried using Siri on my iPhone to call my neighbor below me to help me (and to warn him of the waterfall that was about to deluge his condo) but he wouldn’t answer, and my hands were too wet to dial a second time…so I let go of the hole and ran into the storage closet to grab duct tape, hoping to be able to wrap the tape around the hole, but I didn’t have duct tape, only packing tape. I ran back into the kitchen through the now 2″ of water that had filled the living room, all hallways, and my bedrooms. I spent 5 minutes desperately trying to wrap tape around and around and around the pipe but no matter how many times I wrapped it, the water would just push it off to the side and continue flooding the house. I was completetele drenched, and water had filled up the kitchen cabinets and drawers and was pouring out of them. I ran to my neighbor’s house and banged on his door over and over again until he finally answered…I told him the condo was flooding and he appeared not to think it was a big deal. I told him that he needed to immediately shut the water off for the entire building and ran back into my condo to put my thumb back on the pipe. When I got back to the condo, water was pouring out of the front door, and I didn’t have the strength left in my hand to hold the water back on the pipe…my neighbor came upstairs 2 times asking if the water was off, and OBVIOUSLY with the water shooting out all over the condo, it was NOT. Then my neighbor below me came running in and was flipping out that his condo was full of water, I yelled back that I couldn’t let go of the hole and needed the building water shut off…after what seemed like an eternity, the water FINALLY stopped and I was able to get up off of the floor and get a minor amount of relief. I was shaking from panicking, and my hands were bleeding from the water pressure cutting through them. The entire condo had 2″ of standing water in it, which then soaked through the wood floors, under and into all of the walls, and then down into the condo below mine. It then went through his place and into the one below his..and then flooded the condo storage room below that one. We all grabbed every towel we could find in all of our condos and started soaking up the water, and tried mopping up with anything we could grab, sheets, blankets, towels and clothes. After cleaning up the majority of the water I called an emergency plumber who came and determined that the rubber seal had failed and the water pressure shot the water out of the sink fitting. $338.50 later he had replaced it with a new one. I spent the rest of the night cleaning up until 2am, and then went to bed with all of the doors and windows open to try to dry out the condo. That night it was only 51 degrees outside, and 38% humidity. The next day it was only 60 with 38% humidity, so while sleeping impossible due to it being crazy cold in my condo, the weather definitely helped begin drying things out. I ordered a dehumidifier on Amazon with next day air shipping for $190, and left it running for 2 weeks while I was in Vermont. I guess Iwas lucky that my furniture choices meant that no furniture rests on the floors, so no furniture got wet at all.

All of that on top of having my mystery swollen knee that so far has lasted 13 weeks with very little improvement, the shower flood that happened in my Winooski condo (and cost me $3000) just a week before I came to Miami, the $11,000 flood from the fridge in my Miami condo that happened in July 2012 (that I came to Miami to fix, only to have a second flood within 5 weeks of getting here), the flat tire on my SUV that happened on Thanksgiving night, the coldest night of 2013, that took me almost 2 hours to fix!